Grace Russo writes from her hometown in northern Maryland, where she lives with her husband and three girls. In her fleeting spare time, she is the Managing Editor of Pennyworth Publishing and an artist.
A few weeks ago The Catholic University of America sent a text message to its alumni registry: “Hi ___, it’s Grace!” An old friend who saw this wondered whether I’d gotten a new number. No—this Grace is a “Virtual Engagement Officer powered by A.I.” The message ended with a churchy-sounding sign-off: “with faith, reason, and service. Grace.”
As happens with any A.I. intrusion into my life, I had a lot of questions. What happens if you have a conversation with Grace? Where are those chat logs going? Are they public? Does an underpaid intern in the alumni department read through and pick out the best ones for a blog post? Are they “training” material for Grace’s future exchanges with alumni?
If you click the link that accompanied Grace’s text message, you are brought to a webpage; there, at the top, you see a perky, skinny blonde in a blazer. That’s Grace’s picture. Her highlights are growing out, so we can relate to her. She is, of course, a composite image, animated to speak as naturally as possible.
There’s something uncomfortable about all this. Somewhere between twelve percent and thirty percent of the content hosted on the Internet is pornography, which means that a significant portion of the image data used to create A.I. images of human beings is at least indirectly “trained” on porn. What percent of porn is skinny blonde girls? How much of it—no doubt unintentionally—went into making Grace? These are questions that are relevant for the new digital ambassador for the only American university with a papal charter. I’m sure the school has some sort of H.R.-approved filter on her, so she won’t respond inappropriately to anything nasty. But I still wonder about the stuff she’s made of.
This was not the first time C.U.A., of which I am an alumna twice over, had found use for A.I. technology. Earlier this year was the graduation ceremony. Before 2025, students were given cards upon which they could write their names phonetically; if desired, it was possible to go to their deans and discuss the pronunciation of their names. But for graduation this spring, C.U.A. announced that A.I. would handle the name announcements so that the ceremony would run more smoothly. There was a general uproar. After some confused back-and-forth among the student, alumni, and faculty communities, the administration clarified that students were just meant to use A.I. to submit their pronunciations to their deans—sparing them an arduous walk across campus to talk it over with another human being. The idea was that the students could coach a voice simulator on pronunciation from the comfort of their dorm-room or apartment floors, after which they could submit the files to the proper dean. The dean could then listen to the recording over and over again, practicing it without any sort of input from the student, and with no confirmation that the game of pronunciation telephone was working.
As I have mentioned, C.U.A. was established by a papal charter of Pope Leo XIII. His encyclical Rerum novarum asserts the dignity of workers against both soulless capitalism and godless communism. Fair wages, fair hours, and safe conditions were all things he demanded that employers supply to workers. He also revived the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas and built an observatory at the Vatican to encourage the study of astronomy and astrophysics. C.U.A. was part of his general project, too. The school was originally intended to offer theological formation to priests, and over the last hundred-odd years, it has expanded to include the humanities, science, business, law, and nursing. the university claims to have a unique commitment to the search for truth via divine inspiration and human reason.
What use, then, should the university have for an enormously expensive and ecologically destructive parody of humanity? And why name it “Grace”?
By using A.I. in official capacities, C.U.A. risks legitimizing a tool that already threatens to destroy its educational mission. We have already seen A.I.’s effects in pretty much every school in the country: Millions of students habitually use it to complete homework assignments, and it has helped usher in an era of sub-literacy among young people. Why institutionalize it? The mission of a university such as C.U.A. is to seek truth, and a tool such as A.I., which, at best, can provide a lazy, cursory summary of whatever is available on the Internet, undermines that mission.
I feel weirdly close to Grace, since we share a name. My mother named me for the free gift of God’s love and strength, poured out on our parched souls to bring us more fully into communion with the Most High. For the other one, it’s a different story. Someone chiseled her image out of a solidified brick of online waste and thought, “Grace—what a lovely name for a Virtual Engagement Officer.”
